Rallying demands led to Ford of Europe's mid-engined GT70 in 1971, a sassy sports car with potential to lift Ford's image on the track and on the road

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

For Ford in Europe, the late 1960s were turbulent. The conflicting and even warring activities of Ford's German and British arms were shotgun-married by 1967's creation of Ford of Europe to coordinate their products and production. In 1968, Ford's Escort was its first "European" car, followed by the sporty Capri in 1969. A larger car, the Cortina/Taunus, broke cover in 1971. But all this activity still left big gaps in Ford's European product plans.
One gap was a sports car. The gap hadn't existed for very long, because in the 1960s the Germans left sports-car production to Porsche. Until 1968, that is, because in that year Opel started producing its GT, a delightful pure sports car (HS&EC #7). This attractive and affordable coupe upset the balance of power in the important and influential German market, where Ford had no answer.
Another gap was rallying. Thanks to North America's Total Performance initiative, Ford's GT40 and its offspring had a firm grip on Le Mans and endurance racing. In 1967, Ford unveiled its Cosworth-built 3.0-liter V-8, destined to make Grand Prix history (see my column in this issue). But in Europe, rallying was important too. Big events like the Monte Carlo, Tulip, Acropolis and 1,000 Lakes Rallies commanded attention not only in their national car markets but throughout Europe. With rallies demanding both speed and endurance, consumers saw success in them as a guide to the toughest cars they could buy.
Already wise to the publicity value of rallying, Ford's savvy Walter Hayes, a former Fleet Street newspaperman, had encouraged the blue oval's participation since the mid-1960s. Ford was the champion make in European rallying in 1968 with a twin-cam engine in its Escort. In 1969, Fords were still strong, competing with pepped-up standard cars from rivals Lancia and Saab, but they faced fresh competition from out-and-out sports cars. Porsche was pulling down lots of prizes with its 911 as was a brash newcomer, the rear-engined Alpine Renault, flying the flag of the big French automaker.
Northeast of London, in Essex, Ford's rallying base was at Boreham on a disused airfield that also served as a test ground. A newcomer at Boreham in 1969 as Ford of Britain competition director was bespectacled Stuart Turner. Fresh from six years with BMC, where he saw the humble Mini winning major rallies, Turner would have the responsibility of recommending the way forward for Ford in rallying. "The prospect at Ford was exciting," said Turner, while admitting that "it was a bit of an awesome place to an outsider."
Turner's first big test was the Monte Carlo Rally, January 16-24, 1970. Boreham turned out a batch of its best Escorts to be driven by Britain's leading rally driver, Roger Clark, and Finnish flyer Timo Makinen. They were comprehensively humbled. Clark was pushed back to fifth by three Porsches and an Alpine while Makinen was seventh. This was in spite of an all-out effort of which Clark said, "I just couldn't have driven any faster." On Ford's side, Stuart Turner had to admit that "we couldn't build the cars to be any quicker." Ford was the only major company trying to win rallies with the engine at one end of the car and the driving wheels at the other.
On the flight back to England from the south of France, the Ford crew were a disheartened lot. "We were so depressed, it was pitiful to see," said Stuart Turner. "Between Nice and London, we decided that we wanted to beat Porsche and Alpine. We couldn't beat 'em with conventional cars, so we decided to join 'em. That was when we started thinking about the GT70." Also interested in the project was Jochen Neerpasch, competition director at Ford of Germany, although his brief was chiefly racing rather than rallying.
Picking up on the "GT40" nomenclature and named for the year of its conception, the GT70 was Ford's approach to a special car for rallying. Racing was a possibility as well, which is why it was conceived as mid-engined, unlike its Porsche and Alpine rivals, which had their engines overhung at the rear. This followed in the broad tradition of the GT40, which at its 1964 launch had been one of the world's first mid-engined sports-racing cars. Its forerunner, in turn, had been the tube-framed Mustang I of 1962, also mid-engined.
"We went to see Len Bailey," said Turner. Birmingham-born Bailey, then 42, was a fecund source of exotic car-design ideas. With a resumé that reached back to England's Austin and Daimler, Bailey had worked as an engineer for Ford in America, where he drafted some of the early work on the GT40. Returning to the U.K., he was chief draftsman on the GT40 and later in charge of building these exotic coupes. In 1968-'69, with Ford's backing, Bailey designed the F3L, an exotic sports-racing car with Cosworth V-8 power. In neither coupe nor open form did it succeed in outgrowing its teething troubles.
At the time of Stuart Turner's visit, Len Bailey was beginning a transition from a job on Harley Copp's Ford Engineering staff to a freelance role from his home near Maidenhead. He was ready for the Ford man. "He pulled out some plans for a road car," Turner recalled, "for a four or a six." Cheaply enough, said Bailey, prototypes could be built at Maurice Gomm's workshops in Woking with fiberglass bodies made by a firm in Hastings. For $12,000, the first prototypes could be designed and made. Turner won an allocation from Walter Hayes' budget, and the project was given its provisional go-ahead in April 1970.
Len Bailey's brief was challenging. The ultimate aim was to have a car that was suitable to be produced in numbers that would allow it to be homologated for competition in Group 4, which required 400 to be made over a 24-month period. Ford was thinking in terms of 500. This meant that to the extent possible, Bailey was to use components from Ford's parts bins, cheap pieces that were already in volume production. Here, the engine was a critical element.
Objectives for the finished car were in conflict as well, said driver Roger Clark: "The rather impossible brief to Len Bailey was that the car had to be strong enough to win rallies and light enough to win races!" Resolving such a dichotomy would require costly materials and design techniques that were out of bounds for a project like the GT70, which had to result in a car that could be sold in the volumes needed to qualify for Group 4.
Len Bailey's choice for the GT70's structure was a platform frame, lozenge-shaped in plan view, wide through the seating area and tapering in toward nose and tail. Fabricated of 16- and 18-gauge steel sheet above a 22-gauge floor pan, it had vertical box-section members along its flanks that were 6 inches tall and 2 inches wide. His concept was that the steel would be thinner on racing cars and thicker on those for rallying. The complete frame's weight was 146 pounds.
The GT70's roll axis was near-level, with a roll-center height at the rear of 4.0 inches from a suspension that had racing-car geometry with upper and lower arms and upper radius rods going forward to towers jutting up from the frame. The suspension mounts were conventional rubber bushings rather than hard racing-style ball joints, the softer rubber thought to be better for the rough conditions of rallying as well as obviously less harsh for road use.
Len Bailey designed special four-stud, four-spoke road wheels for the GT70. Cast of aluminum by GKN's Kent Alloys, their diameter was 13 inches with a rim width as a road car of 7 inches, carrying Dunlop radial tires. Alternate widths of 8, 9 and 10 inches were designed to suit competition needs. There was room for a full-sized spare plus a small amount of luggage under the rear deck in a removable tray above the transaxle. The fuel tank was on the right behind the firewall, while at the front, a vee panel deflected warm air outward from the radiator into the wheel wells.
Shaping a body around this machinery was the responsibility of veteran stylist Joe Oros at Ford's Dunton engineering center. He and his designers came up with a shape that was generic sports-coupe with more than a few overtones of Opel's GT. A sharp edge curved around the nose and swept back along its shoulders to a tail that was chopped off in the fashionable style pioneered by Dr. Wunibald Kamm. Bumpers were vestigial while gentle swages accented the wheelhouses.
Set into the front deck were flip-up headlamps actuated manually by the driver through adapted window regulators. A removable panel gave access to the screen-washer reservoir and fluids for the hydraulic brakes and clutch. No brake booster was fitted. Lifting up to reveal both the engine and spare wheel, the GT70's rear decklid took a leaf from the Lamborghini Miura with its bold, black louvers. Giving good rear vision, they vented air efficiently from the engine compartment.
Body panels were fiberglass. Len Bailey arranged for their fabrication by a firm at Hastings on England's south coast. Laid up in an attic, they had to be manhandled to ground level with block and tackle in an ungainly style that some Ford men remembered as "The Battle of Hastings." Back at Boreham, the panels were fashioned into finished bodies.
Ford made much of the close consultation of its rally drivers in the design of the GT70's interior, creating a seating buck in which they could check its controls. The Capri provided its instruments, which spread the tachometer and speedometer widely to the left and right of the steering wheel, the speedometer nearer the center of the car. Minor gauges were in the straight-ahead position. Though visually interesting, this layout later won criticism from Ford's rally and racing drivers, who wanted the tach where they could see it more easily.
Switches, gearshift and handbrake were on a central console. Individual bucket seats had 3½ inches of adjustment. On the first cars, the side windows were fixed, but later prototypes had sliding windows with the help of front quarter-windows.
Forty-four inches tall and 68 inches wide, the GT70 attacked the air with 16.0 square feet of frontal area. With a drag coefficient of 0.36, Ford calculated a top speed of 160 mph with an engine producing 240 bhp. Weight at the curb of 1,680 pounds was distributed 42/58 front/rear, shifting to 47/53 with occupants and a full tank of fuel. These were good figures that promised road-gripping traction and handy handling.
All this design work during the summer and autumn of 1970 would go for naught if the GT70 project failed to get the nod from Ford's higher-ups, from Ford of Britain chief Stan Gillen up to and including Henry Ford II. The crucial presentation came in October. Walter Hayes set out the arguments in the car's favor, saying that "Ford's biggest image deficiency in Europe is in the field of engineering reputation, and we have long felt the need for prestige vehicles," something like the recently revealed Mercedes-Benz C111. The aim, he said, would be to price the car around $5,000 at a time when an Escort cost less than $2,000.
With his entourage, Henry strolled around Joe Oros' clay model and perused the GT70's specifications. A smile and a nod green-lighted the ambitious project. All the parts for the first running car were at the ready, said Stuart Turner: "We assembled it in 10 days!" This was a right-hand-drive test car, on the road in November. They started work at once on a second prototype, a more attractively presented show car with left-hand drive. While Stuart Turner and Timo Makinen drove the first car to Monte Carlo to watch the rally, the silver show GT70 made its official debut in the Brussels Salon on January 19, 1971.
Rashly, for a car that had been running for only a few weeks, Turner said at the Brussels launch that "the GT70 has now satisfactorily finished its prototype development. We know that we have a fine car." In fact, a job list prepared in December detailed 14 pages of faults. "However," Turner went on, "we believe that a car of this kind, which is going to be involved in motor sport, needs an additional period of development in an actual competitive atmosphere." The plan was to enter the GT70 in events that were open to cars homologated in Group 6, those that hadn't been built in series.
Meanwhile, another group far from England was taking an interest in the GT70. In September 1969 Ford set up a styling studio at Bruino on the western outskirts of Turin. Headed by ex-Pininfarina man Filippo Sapino with ex-Zagato man Ercole Spada as design chief, the studio's mission was to be a source for Ford of the Italian-style vitality that energized so many of the world's best car designs. The studio reported to Joe Oros in Britain.
Sending their designs and models to Ford in England and America, responding to internal briefs, the Turin stylists worked in complete obscurity-until the GT70 came along. During 1971, Joe Oros sent them the car's package and parameters and asked them to have a go at a suitable style. "We made several scale models first," said Sapino, "and then a full-size model. We started with Styrofoam and then covered it with Epowood, a wood-like epoxy resin. We refined the surface until it was metallic in appearance."
In some of the design's features, admitted Filippo Sapino, "we were influenced by the Maserati Merak"-which also had free-standing struts on its rear deck-"but elaborated in a more eye-catching way." Like other Italian studios at the time, the Bruino group were into ultra-sharp-edged lines, what some critics called the "origami" school of design. "Joe Oros came down and said it was too sharp," said Sapino of their model. "We rounded it off to please him. This was a big help by Joe Oros. If we'd come out with our super-sharp design, it wouldn't have lasted."
Their design not only lasted but also deserves to be considered one of the most masterly interpretations of the mid-engined sports car. It met the test of looking ultra-fast while standing still with its downsloping accent line and a windscreen that seemed to grow organically out of the main body from a depression in which the wipers were concealed. The Bruino design shared the original GT70's hidden headlamps with two NACA ducts adding character to its front deck. An extended tail was not only valid aerodynamically but was also a boon to luggage space.
The Epowood model-regrettably not a running car-was shown at Turin in November 1971. Wearing Len Bailey's new four-spoke wheels, in its metallic-flake Fire Orange finish it was as striking a styling statement as the original GT70 was banal. Although the show car had no finished interior, Ford's British studio under John Fallis had worked out a suitable design in complete detail. Features were a pistol-grip gear lever, stowage space behind the seats and a clock and warning lamps in the coupe's roof.
"That car was about the only thing that was ever publicly known about the work that we did in that Bruino studio," reflected Filippo Sapino. In July 1973, the studio was closed and its activities merged with those of Ghia, where Sapino took over design responsibility. The result of their work on the GT70 was a stunning design, which, while intended to make waves at motor shows, easily had the potential to clothe a superb production sports car for Ford.
Abortive though they were, the GT70's competition appearances in 1971 revealed some shortcomings. The frame wasn't stiff enough, said one Ford engineer: "I'm not sure it had as much stiffness as well-cooked spaghetti." A rigid frame was essential for both racing and rallying. The cockpit was on the cramped side for a busy driver and navigator. The high-placed iron masses of the V-6 engine weren't a help to handling, said Gerry Birrell, the racing driver conducting the GT70's track tests. Instead, the engine of choice was the new Cosworth-built 16-valve BDA four with an aluminum head and 2.0-liter block, giving 230 bhp at 9,000 rpm as tuned by Terry Hoyle.
Only one part of the project yielded a benefit to Ford. This was Len Bailey's four-spoke road wheel. For more than a decade it was used on racing and rallying Fords and eventually on production cars as well. So many were sold as accessories for Fords, which enjoyed one-third of the British market, that their profits must easily have reimbursed Ford for its investment in the GT70. Still, for many, it would have been much better to be driving Boreham's mid-engined car with Bruino's beautiful body.

This article originally appeared in the May, 2006 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.